


Record Scratch

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, F/M, Getting Back Together, Happy Ending, Humor, Implied Sexual Content, Light Angst, Past Relationship(s), Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2020-08-23 11:11:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20241895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: Like most of her history with Marcus Flint, it’s somehow both so much better and so much worse than she ever expected it to be.[ ALTERNATIVELY - marietta & graham are getting married. cho can't sleep. marcus is the best man she never thought she'd see again. ]





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> this was the winning rare pair/fic concept for my [summer slam](https://provocative-envy.tumblr.com/post/186802156472/results) tournament!!! i would like to thank god and also jesus for making this happen, amen
> 
> please enjoy!!! comments/kudos are always appreciated
> 
> xoxo

* * *

Cho is sleeping—deeply, peacefully, _finally_—when her phone rings.

And rings.

And rings.

“Oh, my god, _what,_” she bleats, words muffled by her pillow, because it’s Marietta. Of course it’s Marietta. It’s always Marietta. “Seriously, if you took the wrong train _again_—”

“I’m getting married!” Marietta shrieks, and there’s the low rumble of a guy laughing in the background, a refrigerator door slamming shut and a glass bottle clinking against marble and the faint, thumping fizz of a champagne cork being popped. “Cho! Babe, did you hear me? I’m getting _married!”_

“Wait, you’re—what?” Cho blinks, rapidly, and then glances over at the patently useless sunrise-simulating alarm clock on her nightstand. “_Who_ are you marrying?”

Marietta’s only response is to shriek again, so loudly and so brightly and with such carefree, tangibly infectious joy that the speaker on Cho’s phone crackles, going fuzzy and sharp with static, unable to handle the volume. The intensity. 

And Cho doesn’t hang up, obviously, but she’s a little taken aback by how desperately she _wants_ to.

* * *

His name is Graham Montague.

He is, as far as Cho can tell, basically just a sentient popped Lacoste collar, a mouth-breathing fourth-generation _“finance guy”_ who spends his lunch breaks buying Marietta expensive jewelry and doesn’t seem to own a single pair of socks. He’s big. Tall. The kind of muscular that’s probably genetic but still reminds Cho uncomfortably of that one episode of _Degrassi_ that was all about steroids. Marietta’s starry-eyed and giggly around him, clutching his elbow and twirling her hair around her finger and generally behaving the same way she did the semester they tried to rush a sorority neither of them were blonde enough for.

“Right, so, Graham,” Cho says hesitantly, a few weeks into wedding planning; she’d volunteered to take over so she could spend less time watching Marietta and Graham hand-feed each other bites of overpriced sushi, but it hadn’t taken very long at all for her to realize that watching them hand-feed each other bites of overpriced _cake_ was, in fact, much worse. “The travel agent is going to book the flights and rooms and all of that next week, so I just need a list of your groomsmen? Their names, dates of birth, that kind of thing?”

Four days later, Graham slides over a tri-folded, guacamole-stained sheet of paper that’s been torn off a scraggly yellow legal pad. His handwriting is neat, masculine, all-capital block letters slanted a tiny bit to the right—and it’s ten in the morning, and the coffee shop they’re in is deserted, and he’s gnawing on a Slim Jim that’s only partially out of its wrapper, the sleeves of his cream-colored linen suit bunched up around his elbows.

“Sorry,” Cho says, voice wobbling as she quickly skims the list, “but does that – is that second to last name correct? Like, you spelled it—yeah? It is? Oh, no reason, no, I’m fine, I just—I recognize it. Him. I know him. Knew. _Knew _him. In college. Sort of. Barely. It isn’t important. Did you need another drink?”

* * *

Marcus Flint is not Graham Montague.

Graham Montague is a stranger to Cho, even after a whirlwind month of forced proximity.

Marcus Flint is not Graham Montague.

Marcus Flint is not a stranger.

* * *

Their flight lands late, when the uninhabited parts of the island are already shrouded in darkness, when the miles and miles of beachfront resorts are just twinkling lights and glistening infinity pools and winding strips of pristine white sand.

Cho is exhausted.

Cho is _disoriented_.

Cho has just spent six and a half hours with a navy satin sleep mask covering her eyes, militantly pretending that her Ambien still worked and that the seat directly across the aisle from hers was occupied by literally anyone else. She deserves that, doesn’t she? A reprieve?

An _escape?_

He looks different, which makes it easier, in some ways—he has an undercut now, an overwhelmingly colorful assortment of tattoos dusting his knuckles and his arms and peeking out from the worn cotton collar of his v-neck, from the frayed bottoms of his basketball shorts—but he’s the same, too, tall and broad and strong and _cool, _blank-faced and sharp-featured, the heavy line of his shoulders and the unimpressed slant of his mouth holding a quietly intimidating, uniquely angry kind of tension.

Marcus Flint.

Flint.

Marcus.

_Marcus._

He’d shown up late, right as they were boarding, an Army-green canvas duffel bag in hand, and Graham had managed to pry himself away from Marietta just long enough to give him a brief, oddly heartfelt hug and slap a tacky blue “BEST MAN” sticker onto his chest.

Cho doesn’t think Marcus even noticed her, at that point.

Now, though, she’s balancing on the very tips of her toes, arching upwards, her bottom lip clutched between her teeth as she tries in vain to reach the braided leather handle of her carry-on in the overhead bin—

“Here,” that deep, gravelly, familiar, not-quite monotone voice suddenly says, and then there’s a presence behind her, huge and warm and distracting, and an arm—bulky with muscle, covered in _unfamiliar_ tattoos—stretching out above hers, effortlessly grabbing her bag and heaving it down, dropping it into her vacant seat.

He smells like expensive aftershave and cheap deodorant and the family-sized box of Junior Mints he’d finished off before they even hit cruising altitude.

The Junior Mints are familiar, too.

Nothing else is.

Cho spins around, so quickly she nearly loses her balance—and instantly regrets it, of course, because he’s standing _right there_, hasn’t moved back yet, and it’s like she’s being caged in by the breadth of his shoulders, the intensity of his gaze, like she’s nineteen again, a veritable magnet for crippling sadness and stomach-churning confusion and it’s the middle of the night and her running shoes are pinching her toes and the only things separating the two of them are a greasy diner table and a lukewarm plate of cheese fries.

“Thanks,” she whispers, her lips catching, airplane-dry.

Marcus grunts, the faintest, most inscrutable little furrow appearing in his brow, like he’s making an effort not to frown at her. “Just ask for help next time.”

She doesn’t respond. _Can’t_ respond, actually, because he’s already stepping away, snatching up his duffel bag and a half-full bottle of Dr. Pepper and edging down the aisle. Her heart is racing, her palms sweaty around the flimsy strap of her now-forgotten sleep mask.

* * *

Like most of her history with Marcus Flint, it’s somehow both so much better and so much _worse_ than she ever expected it to be.

* * *

_THURSDAY_

* * *

Cho blames jet lag and daylight savings and the time zone change for how early she wakes up.

She stares out the window in her room for a while, watching the sun rise over the ocean, the hushed, pink-yellow glow chasing away the tender bruises and the dead-end shadows of pre-dawn, highlighting the gracefully drooping silhouettes of palm trees and sand dunes, and then wastes half an hour petulantly debating the relative pros and cons of getting dressed. Going downstairs for breakfast.

She doesn’t want to, not really, but the next four days—this whole long, stressful, interminably stupid weekend—it isn’t about what she wants.

It’s about Marietta.

It’s about making sure that the caterers remember Graham’s pistachio allergy and that the florist follows through on the last-minute spider orchid arrangements and that the resort staff know they need to have the pergola set up in advance because Marietta had hired an astrologist to pinpoint the precise, exact moment the stars—_which _stars, Cho had been too afraid to ask—would be _perfectly_ aligned for her and Graham to say their vows, and Cho can all but guarantee a loud, dramatic, Marietta-sized tantrum if they’re even five minutes behind schedule.

Marietta loves Graham.

Graham loves Marietta.

_That_ is why they’re getting married. Because they’re in love, because they’re ready to commit to staying in love—not because they’re trying to torture Cho, specifically. No one is forcing her to be here. No one is forcing her to pretend she likes papaya-infused crème brûlée. No one is forcing her to think too hard—too much—too desperately—about the past and the present and what could have been, about what _might_ have been, if she’d just been braver or stronger or _better _or—

Cho grits her teeth and scrubs at her eyes with the heels of her palms and swings her legs up and over the side of her bed.

Breakfast, then.

* * *

There’s only one restaurant open at six in the morning, and there’s only one person seated in the dining room when Cho arrives.

“Oh,” she blurts out, much too obviously, tucking an errant strand of hair behind her ear as Marcus glances up and gives her a quick once-over, his face devoid of even a single hint of recognition, of _acknowledgement, _and then turns his attention back to his fruit bowl. He’s wearing gym clothes—black shorts and a faded red Minnesota shirt with the sleeves cut off—and the stubble on his jaw is darker, more pronounced.

She doesn’t know what to do.

She doesn’t know where to _go_.

She hovers near the beverage station, uncertainly pouring herself a steaming cup of Kona Gold—which is ridiculous. Asinine. Nonsensical. She’s an _adult._ An independent, mostly well-adjusted twenty-five year old grown-up_—_adult—woman—_person_—with an excellent credit score and a wonderful relationship with her parents and a somewhat disconcerting ability to function on less than three hours of sleep. She does not need an _invitation_ to sit down and eat _breakfast_ with Marcus _goddamn _Flint.

She _doesn’t_.

Steeling her spine, she tosses her ponytail and makes her way to the buffet and grabs a plate, scooping up hash browns and scrambled eggs and sausage links, bacon strips, honey-glazed ham—a veritable feast, greasy and heavy and not particularly appetizing, honestly; not to her, at least—before she marches over to Marcus’s table.

Her chair scrapes against the floor as she sits down.

Scoots forward.

Rearranges her silverware.

“Sorry,” she says, a few shades shy of defiant. “Is this okay?”

He offers her a short, stilted nod and raises his eyebrows when he notices her plate. “Since when do you eat meat?”

Cho’s cheeks burn. “I—since when _don’t_ I eat meat?”

“Since you were twelve and your teacher made you watch that documentary about inhumane poultry farming.” Marcus shrugs, chewing and swallowing a bite of cantaloupe. “Whatever, though.”

Cho clears her throat. “So,” she says brightly, frantically, _valiantly _trying to change the subject, “you and Graham—you’re friends? Yeah?”

“No, actually, he put up an ad on Craigslist for a best man and I had the weekend free so I figured, hey, why the fuck not—”

“You could’ve just said yes,” Cho interrupts, averting her gaze, jaw working. “Yes, you and Graham are friends. Why is that hard?”

Marcus slouches in his seat, cracking his knuckles. “Yes, Graham and I are _friends_,” he drawls. “We grew up together. Our fathers had summer houses on the same beach in Bar Harbor.”

“That’s nice,” Cho says stiffly. “That you kept in touch. Marietta and I grew up together, too. Not like—not in _Bar Harbor_, but—we met in a ballet class when we were really little, and neither of us were very good, so we—”

Marcus sighs, audibly impatient. “Christ, you still do this?”

“Do what?”

He slouches even further into his seat, knees spread wide, and shakes his head, movements jerky. “We don’t have to talk about _Marietta and Graham_,” he says, dragging the tines of his fork through a congealing mound of hollandaise sauce. He can’t seem to sit still. “You don’t even want to, do you?”

Cho licks her lips, nostrils flaring. Irritation—precarious, uncomfortable—is prickling at her scalp, at her nerves, and she fights the urge to fidget with something. Her too-hot cup of coffee. Her pleated linen napkin. The glazed porcelain tray of raw sugar packets and hazelnut creamer in the center of the table. Whatever fleeting, doubtless misguided burst of adrenaline-fueled confidence had brought her here has vanished.

“Well, what would _you_ would rather talk about?” she asks, exasperated. Embarrassed. “Or do I have to guess?”

Marcus’s expression changes, then, an almost imperceptible shift that has she doesn’t know how to interpret, not anymore. “How’ve you been?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I mean, of course it is, but—” She breaks off, fumbling for a lemon wedge to squeeze into her ice water. “I’ve been fine. Mostly. I got lucky, actually, ESPN picked up my morning show right after I graduated and it—it’s done really well. What about you?”

Marcus pauses, tilts his chin, curls his tongue over the ridge of his front teeth—a defense mechanism, she remembers with a brief pang of clarity, because he was _always_ defensive when he talked about things he liked. Things that mattered. Like he had to justify it to himself, to her, to everyone.

“I’ve been okay,” he says carefully. “I, uh, started drawing again, after I dropped out, and—” He gestures to arms, his chest, to the tattoos she can now see are quite literally everywhere, interconnected, interwoven, a never-ending chain-link tapestry of lines and symbols and colors and shapes, a road map, a canvas, a _story._ “I have my own studio, so—I’m pretty good, I guess.”

Cho flicks her eyes up, hoping she looks—surprised. Impressed. Like she didn’t already _know_ all of that. “You’re pretty good, you guess,” she repeats, huffing out an awkward, disbelieving laugh. “Really.”

A smirk pulls at the corner of his mouth. “That’s what I said, yeah.”

Before Cho can reply—before she can figure out _how _to reply—there’s a commotion over by the entrance to the restaurant. Marietta and Graham, fully dressed and wide awake and predictably fused together.

“Cho _Chang!”_ Marietta shrieks, throwing her arms out and shimmying her shoulders, immediately reaching up to yank her neon pink tube top back into place. She has on a microscopic denim mini skirt and a pair of sleek white cat-eye sunglasses, and the diamond on her ring finger is big enough that it sparkles obnoxiously, even from a distance. “I’d ask why you’re _up _so early but who am I kidding, you’re _always_ up this—oh, _hey_, waiter person, can we get some mimosas going? For the whole table? Yeah? We’re getting _married_, bitches!”

Graham beams and hollers, “Fuckin’ right!” before pressing a sloppy kiss to the crown of Marietta’s head and fist-bumping the yawning hostess and high-fiving a passing bus boy, and Cho—

She smiles, weakly, and takes a long, desperate sip of lukewarm black coffee.

* * *

It’s an endless morning.

A _frustrating_ morning.

There’s an objectively unsafe golf cart ride at breakneck speed through the resort that deposits them in a picturesque, sun-dappled cove—they stumble down the steep, narrow path to the beach below, past waxy green banana leaves and pink and blue and yellow tropical flowers and a weather-beaten metal sign that reads “NATURE PRESERVE” and then Graham pulls two bottles of champagne out of his backpack, not bothering with the glasses Cho can hear rattling around inside.

“To old friends,” Graham starts, popping the first bottle open and giving it to Marcus, who grimaces at the foam dripping down the side, idly slurping it off his wrist. “And _best _friends,” Graham goes on, opening the second bottle and flashing an utterly besotted grin at Marietta. “And the future Mrs. Montague, who I still can’t fucking _believe_ is letting me lock all that down—"

Marietta launches herself at Graham with a piercing, breathless giggle, wrapping her legs around his waist as he holds onto her with one arm. Marcus squints at them, wrinkling his nose and drinking straight from the bottle in his hand and then passing it along to Cho.

She stares at the rim of the it—glistening, dark green, _wet_—before she drinks from it, too, and hates that she feels like she’s chasing something.

After Graham forces them all to wade into the surf to coo at a particularly lazy looking sea turtle, they return to the hotel, where Marietta has signed them up for a palm weaving class in a private cabana by the pool. There’s a tray of drinks waiting for them—mostly rum-based, all adorned with tiny paper umbrellas—and Cho doesn’t hesitate to snatch up a Mai Tai and drain the whole thing in four short gulps.

“Here,” Marcus eventually mutters, reaching behind him—_stretching _behind him, the slightly ragged hem of his shirt riding up just enough to expose more tattoos, different tattoos, the cut of his hips and the flat of his lower abdomen and a neatly trimmed trail of dark, wiry hair that disappears beneath the drawstring of his shorts—to grab a bottle of water out of a nearby cooler.

“What?” Cho asks, dumbly—automatically—taking it from him. “Are you thirsty?”

He huffs, gaze swiveling back and forth between her face and the slightly lopsided swan she’s working on. “You’re a massive fucking lightweight, there’s no way that’s changed, you used to—” He cuts himself off, licking his lips. “You’ve had a lot to drink already. You’re gonna get dehydrated.”

* * *

Cho drinks the water.

She drinks the water, and then orders a quinoa-crusted tofu poke bowl for lunch, and then wanders back up to her room with a half-formed, grossly optimistic plan to sleep off her headache before they leave for dinner.

It’s three in the afternoon.

Their reservation is for seven.

She’d packed five dresses for the weekend, not including the lavender chiffon maid-of-honor monstrosity Marietta had chosen for her, and she’s a little concerned that it might actually take her four full hours to decide which one to wear. Should she go for silky and romantic? Loose-fitting and casual? Tight and short? Pastel-colored or floral-patterned or dark, vampy red?

Cho puffs her cheeks out and shakes her head and turns away from her suitcase.

A bath.

She’s going to have a bath.

She fills the Jacuzzi tub with uncomfortably hot water and pours in a drizzle of hibiscus-scented oil from the hammered bronze jar on the counter. She’s going to relax. Unwind. Soak the tension out of her spine, and the alcohol out of her system, and diligently concentrate on projecting—serenity. Inner peace. Calm, everlasting, cherry blossom-quiet _tranquility._ There’s a charcoal face mask buried in the pile of spa-sized aromatherapy products next to the Keurig. Maybe she’ll use it. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll close her eyes and wake up several days in the future and not have to _suffer_ through any more of Marietta’s impromptu recitations of her sickeningly sweet, hand-written vows; or Graham’s soppy, heartfelt, increasingly nostalgic retellings of how he knew Marietta was _the one; _or their jointly shameless, unsettlingly sincere displays of love and respect and affection and sexual compatibility—or, worst of all, Marcus’s infuriating, inscrutable, _punishing _silence.

Abruptly, Cho sits forward, sloshing water onto the geometrically tiled floor, and braces her arms on the side of the tub.

No.

No, no, no, no, _no._

She steps out onto the plush, dove gray bath mat.

Exhales.

Inhales.

Brushes her teeth.

Plucks her eyebrows.

Blow-dries her hair

Flosses. Moisturizes. Paces. Critically inspects her manicure.

She never did this, before, not with Marcus; never spent the day anticipating a _date_, carefully getting ready and eagerly watching the clock, worrying about how even the wings of her eyeliner were or how glossy the sheen of her lipstick was—because they weren’t together, weren’t dating, weren’t anything, really, except temporary, accidental, middle-of-the-night acquaintances who each had a preference for the treadmills in the farthest, dustiest, least frequented corner of the school gym.

Their friendship had an expiration date—earned or not, _deserved_ or not—and it just so happened to coincide with the moment Cho realized she couldn’t outrun her problems or her grief or her insomnia or _herself_ or the gnawing, aching emptiness of being sad, yeah, sure, but more than that, worse than that—

Being _angry_.

Marcus had been angry, then, too. He’d bristled with it, with a shrewd, mean, irreverently suspicious kind of hatefulness that she’d been fascinated by, that she’d been attracted to, that she’d _understood_, honestly and truly, and getting him to laugh, getting him to smile, getting him to finally look at her like he didn’t expect heartbreaking, backstabbing, _inevitable_ betrayal—it had always felt like an achievement to her.

Like a rainbow at the end of a thunderstorm.

* * *

She picks the dark, vampy red dress.

Tight and short.

* * *

The steakhouse they go to is the kind of upscale, post-modern-masculine place that has a cigar room and a fully male waitstaff and a cast-iron candlestick holder in the middle of the table. There are crushed velvet curtains between the corner booths and dark gold tassels hanging from the miniature lampshades covering the wall sconces and a positively enormous chalkboard illustration of a cow hanging above the double doors that lead to the kitchen.

Graham’s been there before, apparently.

Cho is seated next to Marietta but directly across from Marcus, which means she has a mostly unobstructed view of him slouching and shifting and clenching his jaw and stretching his shoulders and rubbing at his freshly shaved chin and fiddling with the cuffs of his dress shirt before he just—yanks at the buttons and almost _violently_ rolls his sleeves up to his elbows. The results are uneven. Messy. He has a teal and purple mermaid tattoo on his left forearm, and a visibly rumpled seam of scar tissue crisscrossing his knuckles.

He’s ignoring Cho.

Pointedly.

_Obviously._

He hasn’t looked at her once, not since she emerged from the elevator in the hotel lobby and he had to help her climb into the shiny black concierge-provided SUV because her heels are too high and her dress is _too_ tight, _too _short, _too_—

He hasn’t spoken to her at all.

Their waiter is named Cormac. He has a Scottish accent, and a wickedly charming grin, and he enthusiastically fist-bumps Graham, totally unprompted, as soon as Graham mentions the wedding.

“My _man,_” Graham all but groans, laughing appreciatively and clapping Marcus on the back. Marcus scowls at Cormac’s bow tie. “You guys still do bourbon flights, yeah?”

Marietta rolls her eyes and sighs dramatically and makes a _Sex and the City _joke that no one but Cho knows to giggle at and then orders them both Cosmopolitans.

Cormac winks at Cho before he saunters off.

Thirty minutes later, the drinks and the scallops and the onion straws and the garlic herb chevre spread has been delivered, and Marietta is propping her elbows up on the table and leaning forward, wiggling her eyebrows, and oh, oh _no_, that’s her _gossiping_ posture—

“So,” Marietta says, “I was just going to ask Cho, like, _on her own_, but that seemed boring? Like, she’s a _terrible _liar but she could write a recap for a _soap opera_ and make it sound like bible study, you know? And I want a good, real answer, Marcus. And you—you seem like a real straight shooter.”

Graham chokes on a sip of bourbon, spraying it all over the table cloth. “Baby,” he says, plaintive, thumping at his chest, “we talked about this.”

Marietta flaps her wrist like she’s swatting a mosquito, and Cho swiftly finishes off her second—no, her _third_ drink. Gin and tonic. With lime. And a spicy red dust rimming the glass. She doesn’t like gin _or_ tonic, technically, but it seemed important that she regularly remind herself that this weekend isn’t _about_ what she likes. Or wants. Or needs.

Marietta.

It’s about Marietta.

“You and Cho—my best and dearest and most precious friend in the world, Cho—you _know _each other, don’t you?” Marietta asks, just a _bit _too sweetly.

There’s a beat of awkward silence, then, and Cho very responsibly avoids the heavy, frantic weight of Marcus’s gaze, which has suddenly—coolly—_intently_—snapped over to her. As if she has a _clue _what she’s doing, ever, but especially right now. God. She doesn’t even own a strapless bra. Not _one_. And she eats Nutella out of the _jar_, sometimes with a fork if she hasn’t remembered to run the dishwasher in a while, and she keeps having to increase the cloud storage on her DVR because she records whole seasons of _Survivor _and constantly tells herself she’ll catch up the next weekend, when she isn’t as busy, but she _never does_, and she hasn’t vacuumed under her couch since she moved into her apartment three years ago and she still isn’t sure if it’s normal for her shower to make that high-pitched ringing noise whenever she turns the water on hot and she hasn’t reached the REM phase of her sleep cycle in so long she thinks she might qualify as a legitimate medical miracle. 

“Um,” Marcus says blankly, pausing and tilting his chin and curling his tongue over the ridge of his front teeth, just as Cho manages to flag down a waiter by waving her empty glass at him, “yeah, we—met in college. Years ago. It isn’t—wasn’t—it’s not a big deal. I guess.”

Marietta hums, skeptically noncommittal, but doesn’t push it, surprisingly, and then Cormac shows up with Cho’s replacement drink and he winks at her _again_ and Marcus scoffs loudly enough that it startles Graham into ordering another flight of bourbon with their respective rib-eyes and Marietta is waffling between the six-ounce or the eight-ounce filet mignon and Cho is scanning the distinctly fuzzy-around-the-edges salad menu and it’s all—

It’s all kind of a hazy, delicious, dimly-lit blur, after that.

Until they leave.

Until Graham is dealing with the check and Marietta is fixing her makeup in the bathroom and Marcus is skewering Cormac with one last glare as he barrels through the restaurant door and Cho is attempting to crawl into the backseat of the resort SUV, she is, she’s trying super, incredibly, ridiculously hard to do that, to not lose her balance, but her heels really are too high and her dress really is too tight and the rest of her—god, the rest of her really is too drunk.

“Oh, Christ,” Marcus mutters, dashing forward to catch her by the hand and then steady her against him. “You alright?”

“I am _excellent_,” Cho says, squeaking indignantly as he grabs her by the waist and unceremoniously lifts her up and into the car. “I am just—I am _short_, and this is a _monster truck_, and that is _not_ my fault.”

He chuckles as he climbs in after her. “What did I say earlier, huh?” His voice is low, faint, but she thinks he sounds . . . fond. “Massive fucking lightweight.”

“I don’t normally—” Cho hiccups, and then yawns widely. “I don’t normally drink.”

“No shit.”

“It’s just, you know, it’s Marietta’s wedding,” Cho continues, and it’s dark now, oddly quiet, oddly intimate, and Marcus is pressed right up against her, a long, sturdy line of heat and muscle, and he smells like salt and soap and the gourmet breath mints that were served with dessert and it’s—_easy_, maybe, it’s easy and idiotic and reckless and _natural_, too, to just lean into him. Let her head fall against his shoulder and her fingers drift up to his chest. She’s so tired. She yawns again. “And she just wants everyone . . . she just wants us to have a good time . . .”

Beneath her, Marcus is holding himself impossibly still, like he’s afraid to move, afraid to _breathe_—but his heartbeat is loud in Cho’s ears, rhythmic and fast, lulling her into something that almost feels like sleep, and she wonders if she isn’t imagining the hand—big, rough, callused, scarred, tentative—stroking her hair. If it isn’t the beginning of a dream.

“Yeah,” she hears him say, just as her eyes slip shut. “Yeah, okay.”

* * *


	2. II

* * *

_FRIDAY_

* * *

The catamaran is called _Orion_.

It’s a gleaming, spotless white, slicing gently through choppy teal-blue water, the background thrum of the engine melting seamlessly into the blurry, salt-stiff whistle of a late morning breeze. The sky is clear. The sun is bright. The wide, horizontally hazy shape of another island—the one that’s nothing but pineapple farms and sticky black lava formations—is cresting on the horizon, and the much closer, much more famous coastline they’re supposed to be admiring right now is a wildly breathtaking mosaic of crashing waves and driftwood sandscapes and jungle-spackled gray cliffs.

Cho is sitting on the deck by the recycled milk crates full of snorkel gear, leaning back on her elbows, a Styrofoam cup of rapidly cooling instant coffee between her knees. The stray threads dangling from her cut-offs are tickling her thighs, and she’s winding a few of them around the tip of her index finger, watching her skin blossom pink and red and white, tightening, loosening, back and forth, forth and back, over and over and over.

Marietta is curled up on Graham’s lap on the other side of the boat. The crew is milling around the upper deck, where the steering wheel and the radio equipment and the mini-bar bottles of Baileys and Kahlua are. Marcus is—

“There you are,” he says, not-quite casually, dropping down next to her; he leaves several inches of space between them, and Cho can’t tell if it’s an accident or not.

It’s probably not.

Almost certainly not.

“Here I am,” she agrees, sitting up and drawing her knees to her chest, setting her long-forgotten coffee aside. Some of her hair is escaping her sloppy, lopsided braid, tangling in the strings of her bikini top, and it stings, a little, where it pulls at her scalp. 

“You hungover?”

“Brutally.”

“Headache?”

She winces. “Cottonmouth.”

“Nauseous?”

“_Tired_.”

His lips twitch, and she turns to face him, to study him, laying her cheek on her forearm. His expression is as blank and difficult to read as always, but there’s a playfulness there, too, a cautious, wistful hesitance that reminds her of the shimmer of rain-damp asphalt and the neon glow of a 24-hour pizza place and the slow, halting way he told her about his Pay-Per-View Fight Night famous dad, about how throwing a punch sometimes came easier than breathing, than thinking, about how he questioned how much of that he could blame on genetics and how much he had to accept was just his own bullshit—his own _fault_.

Cho remembers grease-splotchy paper plates.

Spiral-ridged parmesan shakers.

Red pepper flakes scattered across a cheap linoleum tabletop.

“Here,” Marcus says, holding up a travel-sized packet of Advil and flicking it onto her lap. “Oh, and Marietta is looking for you. Said she _misses_ you.”

Cho hums. “Well, it _has_ been a while.”

“Twenty whole minutes?”

“Almost thirty. Actually.”

“A lifetime, then.”

“I mean,” Cho says, chin quivering as she suppresses a laugh, fidgets with the serrated paper edges of the Advil packet, “that’s almost as long as her and Graham have been dating.”

“Hey, when you know, you know.”

“Has Graham asked you to tattoo that on his forehead yet?”

Marcus snorts and flashes her a lazy, half-cocked grin, shrugging one enormous shoulder, straining the seams of his threadbare white t-shirt. His boardshorts are covered in glow-in-the-dark fish skeletons, and he’s squinting against the glare of the sun, the glint of the whitecaps, rumpling the otherwise unforgiving symmetry of those sharp, chiseled features. His eyes are a rich, mossy hazel in the light, and his jaw is perfectly square.

Perfectly steady.

* * *

Graham cannonballs into the water with a raucous, carefree shout.

“Oh, my _god,_” Marietta says, tip-toeing to the edge of the boat and peering down at him with thinly-veiled, transparently adoring alarm. She has a life vest on, bulky and mostly unbuckled and a pasty, industrial orange, and she’s chewing on her bottom lip. “There’s a _reef_ there, like, it’s made out of _coral_, you could’ve hurt—”

Graham swims back over, splashing her, and then wraps his hand around her ankle, yanking her forward, down, into his chest—and she gasps and flails, hooking her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips and clinging to him like she really is genuinely afraid of drowning, like she really believes he won’t let her, and Cho observes them with a vaguely uncomfortable, vaguely morbid kind of curiosity.

_Confusion._

Because they’re like a couple lifted straight out of one of those highly unrealistic rom-coms set on a cruise ship, or at a country club, or—whatever, like a purely fictional, Hollywood-shiny rendition of true love, a modern-day fairytale with a neatly glossed-over, implausibly happy ending.

Graham is treading water, tenderly pushing Marietta’s wet, bedraggled hair off her face, her forehead, whispering something to her that Cho can’t hear; Marietta giggles, though, high-pitched and breathless, and Cho clears her throat, glancing at Marcus, who’s all the way across the deck, taking his shirt off.

And he’s not—

He’s not even doing it _slowly_.

Provocatively.

It’s an undeniably normal, undeniably unremarkable motion—a lifted arm, a bent elbow, a quick tug; three seconds from start to finish, tops—but Cho finds herself transfixed by the sight, anyway. This isn’t a cursory hint of bare skin, a brief, teasing glimpse of rippling muscle and vibrantly colored ink, more of an abstract concept than a concrete visual.

Oh, no.

Oh, _no_.

Cho’s mouth is already grossly, disgustingly dry, but it gets worse, then, her tongue completing its transformation into sandpaper and her lips audibly crackling, crinkling, as they part. Stick. She spins around, clearing her throat _again_, and fiddles with the thin yellow cotton of her tank top. She has it knotted in the front, tied up around her waist, but removing it—exposing herself to the sun, to the fresh air, to _Marcus_—

Her scalp prickles.

Goosebumps erupt on the nape of her neck.

She registers the hot, heavy, familiar weight of his gaze, tracing the curve of her spine, the wings of her shoulder blades, the dip of her lower back, and she freezes with her fingers on the zipper of her shorts. It feels strange. It feels exhilarating. It feels like too much and not enough and like a callback to another time—a fleeting, dangerous, altogether too overwhelming time—when she’d felt all of this before.

Noticed all of this before.

Swallowing, she slides her shorts off, gingerly stepping out of them, and plucks a snorkel and a pair of goggles out of the crate to her left. The piping on the goggles is a bright, electric blue, and there are periodic grains of sand lodged in the clear rubbing lining.

“Jesus Christ,” Marcus sighs, flatly unimpressed, as he walks over to stand with her. He grimaces at Marietta and Graham, who are floating off towards the reef, jokingly crooning an old Backstreet Boys song to each other, their hands entwined; neither of them remembered to grab any snorkel gear, but Cho doubts they’ve realized that yet. “I went to a Yankees game with them a couple of weeks ago, but it wasn’t—they weren’t _this_ bad.”

Cho looks askance at Marcus, at the tattoos on his ribs—a roaring sea monster, a cherry-red stop sign, a comic book-style DNA chain of roman numerals. “They’re always this bad.”

“Yeah?”

“I planned this entire wedding just so I’d be too busy to go to brunch with them.”

“Ah.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing, I just—I assumed you were avoiding me,” Marcus says, with virtually no inflection, restlessly cracking his knuckles. “I hung out with the two of them a ton, and you were never there.”

Cho considers how to reply to that—considers how to _deal _with it, god—but ultimately just nods, and then shakes her head, and then blurts out: “I bought a book at the airport. About the fish here. The _marine life_.”

Marcus furrows his brow. “Okay?”

“There’s this sea urchin that’s so poisonous it can kill you.”

“Yeah, sounds about right.”

"Clown fish."

"Mm."

"Stingrays, too."

"No shit?"

“Yeah, you ready?” Cho asks abruptly. Nonchalantly.

“For what?”

She doesn’t bother to answer—instead, she takes advantage of how distracted he seems and nimbly jumps backwards, discarding her snorkel mask and reaching up to plant both her hands on his shoulders so she can shove him, hard, directly into the water below.

* * *

Cho’s room is right across the hall from Marcus’s.

It makes sense. The travel agent had booked all the rooms together, and she’d coordinated a big block of them on the same floor—on _this _floor—for when the rest of the wedding party arrived tomorrow. Cho and Marcus were just here first. Earliest. It makes sense that they have _these_ rooms, rooms with only six feet of generic blue hotel carpet standing between them, because they’re at the very end of the hallway—the well-lit, lemon-scented, incredibly _long_ hallway—since Cho has never been particularly lucky, has she?

It wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, if it weren’t so quiet.

The silence is awkward—muted footsteps, hushed voices, the distant, mechanical whir of the air conditioning, the elevators, and the low, groaning squeak of Marcus’s flip-flops, the well-worn brown leather rubbing against his skin—and she’s hyper-aware of every breath she takes, of how ragged or soft or off-beat or shaky or uneven it is, because they’re in a confined space, technically, and she _has_ to be.

“So, uh, it’s still pretty early,” Marcus finally says, scratching at his neck. “What, uh.” His face twists, like he’s annoyed with himself, and then he pauses, tilts his chin, curls his tongue over the ridge of his front teeth. “Did you want to—hang out?”

“Hang out?”

“Yeah, like—dinner. It’s dinner time, right?”

“You want to have dinner with me?” There’s a “DO NOT DISTURB” placard hanging from his door handle. Cho is almost positive it’s been there since they checked in. “In your room? Or—in my room? At a restaurant?”

Marcus grapples with his room key, smacking it against the heel of his palm. “Yeah, my room,” he grits out, and the tips of his ears are ruddier, _redder_ than they were just a minute ago, like he’s embarrassed, which—oh. _Oh. _“We could . . . watch a movie. Order dessert. I don’t—cheesecake, you used to love that, they probably have a version of it here made with, like, starfruit and hazelnuts and skim coconut milk and those little flowers from the—on the leis, I don’t fucking—”

“Yes,” Cho blurts out, reflexively licking her lips, hitching her bag higher up on her shoulder, pinching her fingertips together. She reeks of sea salt and Coppertone and the sun-kissed rubber from the snorkel gear. “Yeah. _Yes_. We can—yes, we can do all of that. Yeah.”

Marcus crosses and uncrosses his arms, inadvertently flexing his biceps, and coughs into his fist. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay,” he says again, and the silence in the hallway—the ambient noise, grating and pervasive and awkward, still—it fades out for a second, tunnels, like the fleetingly dry patches of concrete blocked out beneath a freeway underpass when it’s raining. Cho can’t hear anything but the dull, frantic slosh of her heartbeat, and even that’s too intimate, suddenly.

Too _loud._

* * *

It isn’t a date, and Cho refuses to treat it like one.

* * *

She goes to her own room, changes out of her bathing suit, takes a perfunctory shower—scrubs, lathers, rinses, _avoids_—and blow-dries her hair just enough that it doesn’t drip down the middle of her back. She’d packed lingerie—god, what hadn’t she packed—but she turns away from the silky, jewel-toned negligees and the lace-paneled camisoles, the slinky black romper with the particularly revealing cut-outs; because this isn’t a date, it _isn’t_, and it doesn’t matter what she wears.

An oversized black t-shirt.

A pair of plain gray cotton shorts.

She isn’t trying to impress anyone, and she isn’t nineteen anymore. She can be just friends, just whatever she wants, with Marcus Flint.

She _can._

Knocking on his door is an adrenaline rush—like skydiving, or bungee jumping, or belly-flopping off a cliff, not that she’s actually done any of those things—but he flings it open so quickly that she wonders if he wasn’t standing right there, right on the other side, waiting for her. He must have been. Had to have been.

There’s silence, then—_more _silence, charged and guarded and so, so full—which Cho latches onto, uses to firmly remind herself, again, and again, and _again, _that this isn’t a date. Absolutely not. It’s a coincidence. A fluke. They haven’t been truly alone together in six years, and the last time they were truly alone together—six _years_ ago—it ended about as badly as it could have, considering.

Not explosively, or dramatically, or even sadly, really; just with a reflective, yearning, _tired_ kind of disappointment.

“Hey,” Marcus says now, _not_ six years ago, and Cho startles. “I, uh—I ordered burgers? If that’s cool? Yours is vegetarian, don’t worry, but I didn’t really—I think they put pineapple on—”

“They put pineapple on everything here,” she interjects, smiling wryly, and he stares down at her for a second, for two seconds, his mouth open and his gaze intent and his expression frozen with—

Nerves?

Dread?

It’s impossible for her to tell if she should be insulted or flattered by that, which she remembers being a fairly regular occurrence with him, before. He gave odd compliments, had even odder ideas of what qualified _as_ a compliment, and it always used to leave her feeling wrong-footed and off-balance, perpetually unsure of herself, of him—because he wasn’t pleasant, or friendly, or nice, not even to her, but he didn’t _lie_. He was gruff and insensitive and uncannily perceptive, with scabs on his knuckles and a jagged, casually caustic sense of humor, and he didn’t say things he didn’t mean.

He didn’t say things for the sake of _saying _them, just to make someone—make _her_ feel better.

And back then, she was supposed to be sad. She was supposed to be damaged. She was supposed to be tragically, simplistically, prettily fragile, and Marcus Flint, whose anger—latent and bitter and pulsing and rough and inescapably, impenetrably alive_—_practically needed its own zip code, he hadn’t cared.

She’d envied that, before.

She’d _marveled_ at it.

Cho stands in front of a camera five mornings a week and pretends to give a shit about _baseball, _specifically, because she didn’t test well in any of the major markets for NBA or MLS or NHL coverage and she wasn’t _seasoned_ enough for football—_“You’re the girl next door, the girl these men invite into their homes and offices for breakfast, your job is to be sweet and easy to digest, like a—like a strawberry. A bowl of Lucky Charms.”_

She thinks she might still be a little envious of Marcus Flint.

She thinks she might still be _marveling_ a little bit.

“Are we eating in the hallway?” she teases him. Her voice wavers, which she chooses to blame on sleep deprivation, not . . . whatever. Nostalgia. Regret. It all tastes the same, anyway. “Or—”

“Sorry,” Marcus mutters, darting backwards, raking his fingers through his hair with one hand and fumbling for the doorknob with the other. He sweeps his arm out, gesturing her into his room, and his frustration—his consternation—is palpable as she sidles past him, her shoulder brushing against his chest. “Sorry, I—forgot. They, uh, they set everything up on the balcony, so. Yeah. It’s—it’s out there.”

His room is identical to hers—the same bland ivory carpeting, the same brushstroke-patterned wallpaper, the same cattycorner configuration of armchairs next to the sliding glass door—but his duffel bag is lying on the floor, partially unzipped, instead of on the tasteful wicker luggage stand. There’s a half-full bottle of water and an iPad on the nightstand, and a drugstore bag of miniature Junior Mint boxes on the desk.

His bed isn’t made.

The sheets are rumpled, the coverlet pulled back, the pillows piled on one side.

“Did you order cheesecake?” she asks, stepping out onto the balcony. It’s twilight, and his view is of the pool, not the beach. She can see a winding row of tiki torches and some silvery tendrils of smoke floating up from a luau. “And if you did, is it actually starfruit-hazelnut-coconut milk flavored?”

Behind her, Marcus barks out a strangled-sounding laugh. “Nah. It's guava.”

Cho sits in the cast-iron chair closest to the wide stucco banister and reaches for a neatly folded linen napkin, spreading it across her lap. “Are those even native to Hawaii?”

“What?”

“Guavas.”

“Fuck if I know.” He settles across from her, shifting uncomfortably, and props his elbows on the table. The muscles in his forearms are—thick. Corded. Taut. “Why?”

“Oh, I just think it would be interesting,” she says, toying with a sweet potato fry. There’s a small serving dish crowded with tiny silver tureens of dipping sauces, spicy smelling ketchup and honey mustards and lemon-garlic aioli. “To find out how much of all of this is, you know, _real._ Natural. Not just—branding. A perpetuation of the tropical stereotype.”

“Yeah. Sure.” Marcus hesitates, and then jerks his chin at her plate, forcing a slightly a wobbly smirk. “Medium-rare, right?”

Cho frowns down at her burger, gingerly lifting the bun up to inspect what’s underneath. “I thought—you said it was vegetarian?”

“Yeah, no, it is, I just—I was joking. Like. Ha, the black bean—veggie—thing, is . . . medium-rare . . . like a steak?”

“Oh.”

He looks pained. “Yeah.”

“It wouldn’t be a steak, though, would it?” she muses. “It would be a burger. So. Medium-rare like a _burger_.”

“It’s already a burger,” Marcus says, stilted and stiff and almost _grim_, too. He’s holding a pint glass of cold, foamy, dark amber beer, and condensation is dripping down to the pads of his fingers. “The joke was—it doesn’t matter. It was a shitty joke. Did you want a drink?”

Somehow, it gets worse.

He pours her a glass of red wine, which she emphatically, desperately hates—but he wouldn’t know that, _couldn’t_ have known that—and she attempts to ask him about some of his tattoos—there’s a swan on his wrist, right on top of his pulse point, surrounded by a pair of black-and-white Chucks with the laces tied together and a shooting star burst of green and blue, sage and periwinkle and emerald and navy—which results in about a minute of panicked, wide-eyed prevaricating and a halfhearted explanation of color theory. He drizzles hot sauce on his burger, and she steals the pickle spear off his napkin.

Eventually, Cho sighs. “It used to be easier, didn’t it?” she murmurs, tilting her head and swirling her wine around. “This? Us? Talking?”

“Yeah.” Marcus sniffs and grunts and gulps down the rest of his beer, setting the glass on the table with a rattling thud. “We must’ve grown out of it.”

She blinks in surprise, her eyebrows flying up, her lips moving soundlessly, her breath _catching _in her chest, audibly, obviously, transparently, because that’s the first fully direct, fully complete reference he’s made to the past, to _their_ past, and—

The phone inside his room begins to ring.

“I should get that,” Marcus says immediately, glancing away from her and shoving his chair back with a jarring shriek of metal on cement. “It’s probably Graham, he figured out how to program his speed dial yesterday, the fucking loser, and we’re getting up early tomorrow to grab everyone from the airport so I’ll just—get that. Yeah.”

* * *

It isn’t Graham.

It’s the restaurant calling to apologize about running out of guava cheesecake.

* * *


	3. III

* * *

Cho doesn’t sleep well, which isn’t particularly unusual.

She does wake up profoundly, peculiarly irritated by that, though—which _is_.

“You look like shit,” Marietta says bluntly, pouting at her reflection in the boutique mirror. She carefully holds her champagne flute up and out of the way as she twirls around, from left to right, swishing the silky, peacock-blue mini-train of her dress around. “Why do you look like shit, babe?”

Cho puffs her cheeks out and listlessly reaches up to tighten her lumpy disaster of a ponytail, tucking her chin into her shoulder to hide her yawn. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Because of Marcus?”

Cho rears back, choking on what must be oxygen but tastes a lot like stomach acid, her yoga pants slip-sliding on the pink velvet settee with a sad little squeak. “I’m—_what?_ Why would I—why would _he_—what does _Marcus_ have to do with—exactly _what_ are you implying?”

Marietta lifts her chin and purses her lips and makes an exaggerated kissing noise, swilling the last of her champagne before clumsily depositing the glass on a nearby table. She then smooths her hands down her body, rumpling the fabric of her dress, critically inspecting her hips, her thighs, her chest—she cups both of her breasts, testing the weight, squeezing them together, shooting a petulant frown at the scandalously low neckline that doesn’t leave any room for a real bra.

“I was not implying _that_,” Marietta finally says, spinning around to actually make eye contact with Cho. Marietta’s expression is mild, earnest, familiar, faintly creased with concern—crimped like a pie crust, all around the edges. “But it is _very _interesting that’s the first place your mind went.”

Cho takes a sip of her champagne, fighting the urge to groan. “I told you. _He _told you. We knew each other in college.”

“I went to college with you,” Marietta says, raising a single perfectly shaded brow. “Like, we lived together. All four years. If _you_ knew him, then _I _knew him, and I definitely _did not_ know him.” A dreamy smile flits across her face. “If I _had _known him, I might’ve met Graham sooner.”

“We met at the gym.”

“_Oh?”_

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t—it was just—it was right after Cedric, like, _right _after Cedric, and we were just . . .” Cho trails off. This is barely a secret—was barely a secret _then_, too, even if it had felt like one, burned like one, _ached_ like one—but Marietta is watching her now with something like understanding. Something like sympathy. Slowly dawning and miserably helpless. “We were friends. Sort of. For a few months. He dropped out after that semester, and we didn’t keep in touch, and that’s—that’s it.”

Marietta hums. “That’s it, huh?”

“That’s it.”

“Graham’s convinced you guys are, like, super mysterious ex-fuck buddies.”

“Why would that be _mysterious?”_

“Because Marcus doesn’t date,” Marietta says matter-of-factly. “It’s, like, a whole thing. A whole—_personality trait_.”

Cho rolls her eyes. “Well, we didn’t date.”

“Or fuck?”

“Or—that.”

“Oh, my god.”

“What?”

“Come on, say it.”

“What? No.”

“Say _fuck_.”

“You’ve heard me say fuck before.”

“But not in this _context_.”

“What _context?_ What?”

“_Marcus_ context.”

“There is no _Marcus _context.”

“Just say the word.”

“No.”

“Cho.”

“Marietta.”

“Cho _Chang_.”

“Mrs. Graham Montague—”

Marietta sputters and promptly trips over the bottom step on the mirrored dais, bunching her dress up in her fist as she stumbles towards the settee. “God, I _love_ that,” she says, dropping down next to Cho and jostling her with the point of her elbow. “I really love—remember when we used to practice signing our names like that? In middle school?”

Cho smirks and digs her own elbow into Marietta’s ribs. “I remember you asking your mom for _calligraphy_ lessons, yeah.”

“Oh, shut up, _Mrs. Roger Davies._”

“Hey, that could still happen.”

“Sure,” Marietta says magnanimously, twirling the price tag on one of the dresses Cho had picked out. It’s nice. Short. A pearlescent turquoise, with white chiffon straps crisscrossing the back. “But probably not until all this _Marcus context_ goes away.”

“It wasn’t like that between us,” Cho says again, even though it _was_—kind of, maybe, almost. “I mean, it wasn’t . . . entirely platonic, you know, in hindsight, but we never—we kissed. Once. And that was it.”

Marietta’s mouth flaps open as her eyes go impossibly round. Big. Wide. She looks unfairly startled. “You—wait, really?”

“What?” Cho asks, tugging ineffectually at the front of her tank top, trying to force it to lay straighter. Flatter. Neater. “What is so astonishing about that to you?”

Marietta huffs out a giggle that’s very nearly hysterical, and then snatches up Cho’s forgotten flute of champagne, downing it in two quick gulps. “You were—and, like, no offense, babe, you’re my forever girl, don’t take this the wrong way—but that entire year, the year after Cedric, you were, like, a zombie. A really messy, tearful, sad zombie. I just—I can’t imagine you . . . _kissing_ someone. Anyone.”

Cho clenches and unclenches her jaw, tilting her head back to stare up at the ceiling. The shadows. The crown molding. The stylized bronze spotlights and the tinkling, rainbow-tinted crystals dripping from the chandelier.

“Marcus was different,” she snaps.

“Was?”

“He was—I don’t know,” Cho admits, because she feels, abruptly, like she’s about to cry. Sore throat. Stinging retinas. Shallow breathing. Grief counselors could only dig so deep before they hit bone and gristle, before they hit rock bottom, and Cho had assumed—had _believed_—that she’d successfully buried all of this in the past, where it belonged. Marcus was the past. Marcus was the present. The intersection of the two—it shouldn’t be this complicated. She shouldn’t still be this conflicted about it. “I don’t really know him anymore, do I? Marcus?”

Marietta squints at her. “So get to fucking know him again,” she says plainly, incredulously, like it’s really that easy, that simple, and Cho—

Cho snorts out a suspiciously wet, garbled laugh, her lashes brimming with tears, and leans sideways into Marietta, shifting so she can wrap her arms around Marietta’s shoulders and bury her nose in Marietta’s hair.

“Thanks,” Cho mumbles, sniffling, as Marietta draws her own arms up and around. “That dress would be pretty for the reception, by the way. You look like a mermaid.”

“Mm,” Marietta agrees, resting her chin on the top of Cho’s head. She smells like she always does, like the inside of an upscale nail salon, but she’s warm. Comfortable. “Can I just say, though, because I hardly ever get to—”

“What?”

Marietta pulls back and flashes a fond, wicked grin. “You _really_ look like shit right now.”

* * *

The hike isn’t planned—it’s past two by the time everyone trickles back out of their rooms and into the hotel lobby, and Padma is wearing strappy suede gladiator sandals, for god’s sake—but one of Graham’s groomsmen, the one with the smarmy British aristocrat name and the crisply ironed Tommy Hilfiger khakis—_Cassius, Cassius Warrington, no, not _those _Warringtons_—is some kind of glorified academic gardener, as far as Cho can tell, and he wants to see the _island_ _fauna_.

“Flora,” Penelope corrects Cho, tossing her hair back—long and curly and dyed a shimmering dark blue—and hitching her gear bag higher. Freckles are already beginning to dot Penelope’s arms and cheeks and chest, and Marietta keeps periodically spinning around to spray sunscreen and mosquito repellant at her. “Fauna is animals.”

Cho curls her toes inside her running shoes and glances to where Marcus is scowling at the other _other _groomsmen—Adrian? Andrew?—and batting a palm frond out of their way. Marcus has a green and gray paisley bandana tied around his bicep and a ratty old Dodgers hat on backwards. A large tattoo slithers out from the collar of his sleeveless shirt, up the nape of his neck—a green snake dangling from the spindly silver hooks of an arcade claw machine game.

“Does he work in the same field as you?” Cho asks Penelope, gesturing to Cassius, who’s marching several feet away, red-faced and sweaty, muttering under his breath as he holds up a pair of professional-looking binoculars. “You seem to . . . recognize each other?”

Penelope’s lip curls. “_Work,_” she sneers, with literal finger-quotes. “He didn’t even finish his graduate program, his father just _bought a position_ on the trustee board at National Geographic and got him a job, it’s completely—”

“It’s completely _what?_” Cassius demands, briskly catching up with them. “Fair? Yes, I agree, it _is _completely fair to utilize the resources at my disposal to get ahead in what you very well know is a monstrously competitive industry.”

“There’s nothing fair about nepotism,” Penelope says, the crunch of her boots on the dirt track growing louder. More ominous. “Which is precisely how you _got ahead_.”

“What, like an extra five months of school was going to be the difference between me deserving or not deserving my job?”

“An extra five months of school, and then maybe a fellowship with an institution that isn’t _named after your grandfather_, and then—”

“Oh, is that all?”

“No,” Penelope hisses, “you’d also need to quit regularly regurgitating your classist, elitist, disgustingly self-serving interpretation of the so-called _industry _and its standards.”

“That’s funny.”

“What is?”

“You acting like you know what _standards_ are.”

Penelope skids to a halt. “Not all of us made _virginity pacts_ with ourselves in high school, _Cassius._”

At that, Cassius’s already red face turns improbably redder. “I didn’t realize being concerned about the teen pregnancy rate in this country was a _flaw,_ thanks for—”

They continue bickering, and Cho grimaces, jerking her thumb towards Graham, who’s now carrying Marietta on his back. “I’m just, um,” Cho tries to interrupt, but Penelope and Cassius ignore her. “I’m gonna go . . . over there. Okay. Cool.”

Farther up the trail, Marcus is pouring a bottle of water over his head, shaking the excess off and carelessly slurping at what trickles into his mouth. He’s removed his shirt, tucked it like a towel into the waistband of his shorts, and just like on the boat—just like always, if she’s being honest with herself, which is a slightly less terrifying prospect today than it was yesterday, than it was a _week_ ago—it strikes her that there’s so much of him that’s new to her. It isn’t just the tattoos, or the undercut, or the bulk he’s grown into, the broad shoulders and the thick neck and the heavily muscled chest; no, it’s the gentleness. Because he’s gentle and perceptive and considerate and observant and _sensitive _even if he likes to pretend that he _isn’t_ and—

Cho clears her throat, suddenly light-headed, and hurries to catch up to Marietta and Graham.

* * *

The waterfall is a sparkling, picturesque stream cascading down the flat side of a mossy cliff, surrounded by the gloss and gleam and riotous green palette of the jungle.

Penelope and Cassius are still not speaking when Padma drolly suggests a swim to cool off, but Adrian and Graham fist bump and let out matching obnoxious battle cries before stripping off their shirts and leaping into the pond. Marietta just sighs and cheerfully pulls another bottle of champagne out of Graham’s backpack.

“It’s like Gatorade for people who are getting married tomorrow,” Marietta says sagely, popping the cork and beaming when it bounces off a nearby vine. “I’m people. _I’m_ getting married tomorrow.”

“Fuck yeah, baby!” Graham shouts, voice garbled as Adrian jams an elbow into his gut and dunks them both underwater.

Cho is sitting on a large, sun-warmed rock, far enough away from everyone else that she can’t really be expected to participate in—anything. Conversations. Drinking games. She wants to think, but she doesn’t want to _remember_. Remembering was a winding, twisting, moonstruck road full of pitfalls and land mines and grimly reflective warning signs, DEAD END and KEEP OUT and DO NOT ENTER. Remembering wasn’t safe. Remembering fucking hurt.

Marcus was not a stranger to her.

_She _was not a stranger to _Marcus_.

Marcus had known her when knowing her meant _putting up _with her, when liking her meant something so much different, so much _more_—Marcus had run next to her every night when she still hadn’t figured out what she was running to, what she was running from, and _he’d_ been the one to eventually slow down and yank his earbuds out and reach over to slam the STOP button on her treadmill, to impatiently shove a vending machine apple juice and a box of Junior Mints into her hands, to glower at her under the dingy fluorescent grid lighting until she drank and ate and presumably looked less like the zombie Marietta had insisted she was.

Cho had always thought _that_ was the turning point—this stranger, this nobody, this angry, sullen, intimidating _boy_ being _kind_ to her, in his own way—but maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe it came later.

Maybe it came now.

“Hey,” Marcus says, dropping down on the rock, on _her _rock, and holding up a gift shop bag of macadamia nuts. “Snack?”

She nods, fidgeting with the thin orange nylon of her shorts. “Thanks.”

He grunts and spreads his legs, stretching his arms behind him and leaning backwards, as if to soak up as much of the sun as he can, and she’s momentarily distracted by how the ink on his torso—seeped into the flat planes and rippling ridges of his abdomen, the solid cut of his hips, the sweat-damp divot between his collarbones—how it moves _with_ him, supple and sinuous, how it doesn’t seem decorative so much as it seems ingrained. Innate.

“You know that saying?” he asks, squeezing one eye shut and licking his lips. “About, like—how you never actually forget how to ride a bike? Or swim? Or—whatever?”

Cho plucks a macadamia nut out of the bag. “Yeah. It’s about muscle memory, right?”

Marcus arches his neck a bit to look at her, to _study _her, and she seizes the opportunity to study him right back.

He isn’t—has never been—especially good-looking. Not classically, traditionally handsome, not like Cedric was, not like Cassius Warrington is; Marcus is hard lines and sharp edges and unforgiving, _uncompromising_ strength. She’d noticed him before he’d noticed her, noticed how he preferred the rowing machine to free weights, how he could spend twenty uninterrupted minutes on the pull-up bar, how gracefully, smoothly _in control_ he was of his own body—he was an athlete, even if he’d given up on playing sports, and she’d understood that. She’d recognized it.

“Hey,” he says again. “You’ve got—”

Before she can respond, he’s sitting up, leaning forward, leaning towards her, and he’s reaching up to slowly brush his thumb over the curve of her cheek. It’s a graze. A whisper. Barely there at all. He catches her eye, though, and the air changes, buzzes with a brand-new spark of molten-hot intensity, and _his_ eyes—they’re green, they’re brown, they’re _dark_. 

“You had . . .” He waves the fuzzy strand of yellow-gold flower pollen that he must have swept off of her. “There.”

* * *

She doesn’t lift her own hand to her cheek until he’s left again.

And it could be the heat or the exertion or the sunburn or—anything, it could be anything, but—

She feels it.

She feels _exactly_ where he touched her.

* * *

The clock on Cho’s bedside table reads 1:11 in big, blurry, digitized red numbers, the same color as a traffic light, and despite the Thermostat being set to a relatively frigid 62 degrees, she has the ceiling fan on, too. For the white noise. The clicking and the rattling and the whirring.

1:12.

1:13.

She can’t quite get settled, keeps turning over, moving from her front to her back to her side to her _other _side, punching her pillow and wriggling her hips around and kicking her sheets off; there’s a half-empty room service mug of chamomile tea sitting on the floor, ice-cold by now, and four untouched prescription bottles lined up on the bathroom counter like a bunch of useless, long-suffering, highly judgmental soldiers. Like the guards at Buckingham Palace.

1:14.

Time isn’t passing so much as it’s dragging_, _and her skin feels tight, itchy, like an uncomfortable sweater or an ill-fitting underwire bra she can’t wait to take off when she gets home. Her thoughts are blaring at her, nauseatingly loud, blown-out speaker static or a wailing police siren transposed over the topsy-turvy jumble of a word search puzzle.

1:15.

1:16.

1:17.

With a strangled, petulant groan, she rolls off the bed and rakes her fingers through her hair, unable to decide between combing it straight or messing it up further. She jiggles her knee, tapping her foot against the carpet. Her laptop is on the desk, next to the TV remote and the envelope containing her extra room key, and she gnaws on the inside of her cheek when her eyes land on it. 

1:18.

1:19.

It’s a bad idea.

Dumb.

Impulsive.

_Bad_.

Six years is six years, snapshot-short or interminably endless. If the past few days have taught her anything, it’s that they really can’t just pick up where they left off. They’re different people than they were—grown up, or something vaguely grown-up adjacent—and no matter how easy Marietta makes it sound, it isn’t. It can’t be. Ambushing him in the middle of the night—when he’s very probably _sleeping_, like a normal human being with normal brain chemistry and normal dreams and normal, boring, _predictable_ rich kid daddy issues—it’s insane. _Insane_.

1:20.

1:21.

1:22.

1:23.

Cho grits her teeth, tucks her loose hair behind her ears, and climbs to her feet, striding purposefully over to the desk. Her heart is racing, and her limbs are wobbly, and she’s pretty sure a well-timed infusion of adrenaline is the only reason she’s able to stand upright. The room key is cool against her palm.

1:24.

She doesn’t allow herself to look in the mirror or fix her hair or even slip on a pair of flip-flops before she leaves her room, and she’s weightless—ephemeral, drifting in and out of focus—as she crosses the hall. Three steps. Two seconds. His “DO NOT DISTURB” placard is still there.

She knocks.

And then there’s silence—the sloshing thud of blood rushing to her head, and the distant whine of an elevator hurtling by—and then _footsteps_ are coming from inside his room, sluggish and heavy, stopping and waiting, a shadow passing over the strip of almost-light filtering out, and then—

The door swings open.

“Hey,” Marcus says, sounding confused. He yawns into his forearm. “Are you—alright?”

He doesn’t have a shirt on. Cho isn’t sure why she’s so caught off-guard by that—he was _sleeping, _obviously, and he’s basically been wandering around half-naked since they got off the plane—but it takes her a while to blink as she stares at him. There’s a domino tattooed on his chest, peeking out of an eerily realistic rendition of a kelp forest, and she’s eye-level with his nipples. They’re dusky pink and pebbled from the air conditioning.

“I’m great,” she blurts out, realizing, belatedly, that he’s staring at her, too. At her legs. Her _bare_ legs. “Just—couldn’t sleep. And I know you used to—also—you know—but you look like you _were_, in fact, sleeping, so I’ll just—”

“No, it’s fine,” he says quickly. Too quickly. “I don’t mind.”

“Oh.” Her t-shirt is baggy, falling to her mid-thigh, but her underwear feels flimsy and sticky and see-through and clearly, embarrassingly _visible_, even though she knows it isn’t. “Cool.”

“Did you, uh,” he starts. “Did you want to come in?”

“Yeah, I . . .” She scans his face, curious, wistful, _greedy_, taking in the auburn-tinted stubble and the slightly crooked nose, the mouth that’s red and soft, the smile that’s sly and uneven and somehow always curving _down_ on one side. “I want . . .”

“You want—what?”

Her breath hitches, but she doesn’t answer.

And he swallows, still staring at her, and there’s a jarring familiarity to the moment, to the _tension _of it, that reminds her of that last night, that last _time, _how he’d kissed her, finally, _finally, _how he’d squared his shoulders and set his jaw and dropped his fountain soda from the deli onto the dirty, age-splintered sidewalk concrete, how he’d backed her up against the chalky brick exterior of a brownstone on frat row, how he’d hesitated, how he’d cupped the crown of her head with one huge hand so she couldn’t hurt herself and how the kiss itself—it had been clumsy and cautious and earnest, with too much tongue and too much _pressure, _and he’d tasted like Dr. Pepper and Russian dressing, tangy and sweet and _bitter_, too, like a rushed goodbye—like an ending masquerading as a beginning.

“Okay,” he says now, so quietly she almost doesn’t hear him. He moves aside, holding his door open. “Yeah. Me, too.”

* * *

He licks his lips as she steps forward.

* * *

The lights are off, and the TV is on, muted, a _Pawn Stars_ rerun casting an ethereal blue-white glow around the rest of the room.

Marcus is sprawled out on his bed, sitting up against the beige leather headboard, his expression even more difficult to read than usual. He’s equal parts bemused and wary and quizzical and frustrated, but a strange kind of indecision is lurking there, too, like he can’t fathom why she’s perched next to him, why she’s _interested _in him, in the ink covering his body, but he’s willing to indulge her. Just for a while.

Just for now.

She has her knees tucked beneath her, her posture stiff and her nerves prickling, and she’s being so, so careful not to touch him, which is—ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous concession, a ridiculous _gesture_, and it reeks of futility. There’s nothing casual about this. Casual about _them_. There’s nothing normal about it. It’s fluid. Liquid. Simmering and impatient and inevitable.

“What about that one?” she asks, her fingers skimming the bend in his arm. There’s no direct contact, not really, but he inhales sharply, anyway. “The sunflower?”

“Uh,” he says, shifting his hips as he draws his other arm up to spread across the top of the headboard. “My mom—she liked gardening. Like, a lot. Our house in Boston had this rose garden that used to win, like, awards and shit. I have—I have rose petals, actually—” He twists around, showing off his lower back, the long, lean line of it, the dimples at the base of his spine; there’s a Barbie-pink lipstick kiss, a clawfoot tub with a broken lacrosse stick, and an elegant spray of red and white and yellow rose petals. “But, uh, yeah, she hated sunflowers. Thought they were ugly. _Pedestrian._”

Cho scoots closer, ignoring the way her shirt rides up her thighs. “So, the tattoo . . . is rebellious?”

“What?” Marcus scoffs. “No.”

“Then what—”

“My mom, like, _abandoned _me—us—no, fuck that, she abandoned _me _when I was eleven,” he says, thumb tapping out an unsteady rhythm on one of the tufted linen buttons crisscrossing the headboard. “Just fucking disappeared while I was at school and my dad was in Vegas for a fight. I had to spend the weekend with Graham and his sixty-year old British nanny.”

Cho chokes on a giggle, slapping her free hand over her mouth. “Oh, my god.”

Marcus points to a tattoo on his calf, a chipped porcelain teacup with a rumpled Union Jack wrapped around the handle. “That one’s for her.”

“You spent a lot of time with Graham and his sixty-year old British nanny, then?” Cho guesses, scooting even closer.

“Pomona.”

“Pomona,” Cho echoes. “Right.”

“She liked gardening, too.”

“Is the sunflower—”

“No,” Marcus says shortly, shifting his hips again. “No, the sunflower . . . I just. She never even _called_, you know? Not once.”

“So,” Cho tries, pulse skittering, “the sunflower is because you can’t forget her, and the rose petals are because you can’t forgive her?”

He pauses, tilts his chin, curls his tongue over the ridge of his front teeth. “Yeah. I mean—yeah. Layers, you know?”

“Yeah,” Cho says hoarsely. “I know.”

Marcus brings his arm back down, cracking his knuckles and avoiding her gaze. “Do you have any?”

“What?”

“Tattoos. Do you have any _tattoos_.”

“Oh.” Cho wrinkles her nose. “No, I’ve never . . . Marietta and I were going to get matching ones, after graduation, but we couldn’t agree on what to get.”

“I could draw you something,” Marcus says, and then immediately winces. “If you—like, if you wanted. Or—not. I don’t—”

“Did you draw all of yours?”

“What?”

“Your tattoos,” Cho clarifies, amused. “Did you draw them yourself?”

He shifts his hips _again_, inadvertently causing the mattress to dip so that she’s listing towards him. “Yeah. I—didn’t, uh, didn’t trust anyone else to get them right.”

She hums and pokes the space above his knee. “What about that one?”

“Which one?”

“The one that says ‘PSYCHIC’ in gigantic shiny purple letters, Marcus.”

He snorts. “Right, so, after—” He flaps his wrist, obviously aiming for nonchalant but missing it by miles. Lightyears. “—my last semester, I went to stay with Graham for a while, and I had . . . no fucking clue what I wanted to do, you know, just—none. And so we get smashed one night, just—fucking _wrecked_ off his dad’s, like, priceless heirloom scotch, and when we go out to pick up pizza there’s this, like, sketchy—” He scratches at the back of his neck. “—_place_ with curtains covering the windows and one of those, like, neon crystal balls? On the sign?”

“You and Graham got drunk and went to see a _psychic?”_

“Yeah.”

“And she, what, told you to follow your dreams?”

“Nah.” Marcus shakes his head, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. “She told me to go back to school and fucking—change my major to _sports management_.”

Cho sputters out a laugh. “So, you’re a contrarian.”

“I mean—yeah, but not—really?”

“What do you mean?”

He scrubs at the stubble on his jaw. “The tattoo isn’t about being contrary, it’s about—like, I was just _sick of it,_ you know, of asking permission to do or take or—Christ, even just _like_ the things that I wanted to do or take or . . . or like. The psychic—she didn’t _matter_, but the fact that I was even asking?”

Cho toys with her t-shirt, scraping her fingernail against the loose stitches along the inside of the hem. Her heart is lodged somewhere in the vicinity of her throat. “Yeah. That—that makes sense.” She offers him a tremulous smile. “Layers, right?”

“Right. Yeah.” He looks kind of shell-shocked, like it’s finally occurred to him how much he’s been _talking_. “Listen, Cho, I—”

She swoops forward, grabbing him by the shoulders, and cuts him off with a kiss.

It’s fast, hard, frantic—and he’s surprised, somehow, for some inexplicable reason, and he goes still beneath her, the muscles in his abdomen jumping, twitching, tensing; but he doesn’t push her off, doesn’t kiss her back, doesn’t do much of anything at all besides watch her, his eyes dark and stormy and heavy-lidded, as she pulls her lips away with a slow, slick, smacking drag.

And then she waits.

For him to speak, for him to move, for him to _react_—but he doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t move, and he doesn’t react, not outwardly, and she begins to wonder, with a rapidly curdling pit in her stomach, if she hadn’t been reading him, reading _this_, all wrong. Had she made it up? Invented the lingering stares and the tangible awkwardness and the looming, emotionally charged specter of the past that’s been hovering between them—sometimes bright, sometimes not, but always always _always_ pulsing with awareness? With unfinished business? Was this a weird, regret-induced psychological phenomenon? Was she too late?

“I need you to tell me what you want,” he eventually says, his voice low, gravelly, rumbling through his chest—and she shivers in response, of course she does, because he’s—

He’s Marcus.

He’s _Marcus_.

* * *

Maybe it really is that easy.

Maybe it really is that simple.

* * *

“You,” Cho whispers, tightening her grip on his shoulders, refusing to back away, her lips still close enough to his that their breath swirls, mixes, melts. “I want you.”

* * *


	4. IV

* * *

_SUNDAY_

* * *

The custom monogrammed silk robes Marietta cheerfully lays out for Cho, Penelope, and Padma are the same shade of pale, floaty lavender as their bridesmaid dresses.

“Are we . . .” Penelope asks, squinting doubtfully at the elegant silver stitching spanning the back of the robe. Marietta is in the shower; the sound of splashing water and humming pipes is seeping out with the steam from under the bathroom door. “Do we wear these at the wedding? Or now? Or for the reception? Or—”

“Oh, my _god,_” Padma groans, yanking her shorts off and tossing them towards the far corner of the suite. They up hanging from a pleated linen lampshade, her tank top somewhere over by the potted fichus plant. She tugs her robe on and belts it tightly. “It’s for _now_, so we don’t fuck up our hair and makeup after we get it done. Also, there are _ten_ bottles of wine in that mini-fridge and I fully plan on being too smashed to zip up my own dress in two hours.”

“Oh, my _god_,” Penelope mimics Padma, a little meanly, “you’re in a _wedding_ in two hours, you can’t get _drunk_.”

Cho sighs, slipping her arms into her own robe. “Marietta would probably find it kind of funny, honestly, but . . . no, don’t get drunk. You sing a lot when you’re drunk.”

Penelope snorts and turns her attention to the oversized buttons on her pajamas. “She does, doesn’t she?”

Padma scowls. “First of all, fuck off. Second of all—”

“What’s the absolute worst song we could bribe the DJ to play?” Penelope asks, stepping out of her pajama pants and folding them neatly on a seashell-patterned armchair. “Do strippers make playlists? They do, right?”

“_Second of all,_” Padma goes on, much more loudly, the ruby stud in her nose winking in the late morning light, “I still can’t believe this is even happening. Like, actually happening. Like, she’s actually going through with it.”

“What?” Cho drops down onto the nearest sofa and gingerly crosses her legs. “Who? What are you talking about?”

“Marietta,” Padma says slowly, like she’s speaking to a literal infant. “I can’t believe she’s actually _doing this_.”

“What?” Cho asks again, fiddling with the stem of her wine glass. “Why?”

“Because she’s known him—”

“Graham,” Cho supplies archly. “His name is Graham.”

“—for, like, _three months_—”

“Three and a half, technically.”

“—and I don’t care what kind of bullshit soulmate love-at-first-sight box-office trash-fire _rom-com_ logic they’re using to justify it to themselves—”

“Padma.”

“—but you don’t make _important life decisions_ in the middle of a crowded disgusting Manhattan sidewalk that smells like a cross between horse piss and kielbasa—”

“It was Central Park, come on.”

“—like, Jesus _fuck_, you don’t even ask people you’re dating what their _credit score_ is after three months let alone _legally bind yourself _to them—”

“Graham has a trust fund. His credit is fine.”

“—so, yeah, I just—I _really_ cannot believe this is even happening right now,” Padma finishes, snatching up her wine glass and chugging the contents like they’re still in college and she’s two hours late to a party and trying to play catch up. “I cannot believe _you_ are _letting_ it happen.”

Penelope glances between Padma and Cho with a pinched, slightly pained frown, like she doesn’t particularly want to join the conversation but feels morally obligated to anyway. “For what it’s worth,” she says, “Marietta and Graham—they seem really happy.”

“They do,” Cho agrees, mouth quirking. “And I was skeptical, too. About them. About this. _Very_ skeptical.”

“And now you aren’t?” Padma demands, scrunching her nose up. In the bathroom, the shower shuts off. “Like, I know you and Marietta are ride or die switched at birth blood brothers, or whatever—”

“That . . . doesn’t make sense,” Penelope interjects, nonplussed.

“—but aren’t you supposed to reign her in when she pulls this shit? Talk her out of it? Point her in the direction of the _next _shiny new object?”

Cho clutches her bottom lip between her teeth. “It’s complicated,” she says, even as she shifts in her seat, tilting her head back against the padded turquoise cushion of the sofa. “I think it’s about timing.”

Padma gapes at her. “What the _shit_ does that mean, Chang? _Timing?”_

“Yeah. Timing. I doubt they’d be getting married after four months if they’d met—a year ago, or two years from now, or _six _years ago, or—whenever,” Cho says, stumbling over the words, wondering where they’re even coming from; all along, she’s been inwardly scoffing at Marietta and Graham, at _Marietta-and-Graham_, at this wedding and what it represents and how it doesn’t fit into any of the carefully labeled boxes that relationships—real, adult, long-term relationships—are _supposed _to fit into. “But they didn’t meet then, they met now, and it all . . .” She trails off, swirling her wine. “It all worked out. They want the same exact things _now_, together, and maybe that wouldn’t have been true at another time. That’s—what it means. Timing.”

Padma’s expression momentarily flickers with a begrudging hint of understanding before going right back to blatant incredulity. “Fine, _you’re _batshit, too, I guess.”

Penelope starts to giggle. “Holy _fuck_.”

“What?” Padma asks, draining her wine glass and blindly reaching for another bottle to refill it.

“Cho got mauled by a lumberjack, look at her _neck_.”

Padma spins towards Cho so quickly she sloshes Chardonnay all over the rug. “_What?”_ she bleats. “Was it the—the waiter, the absolutely _scorching _hot one? From the bar by the pool?”

Heat creeps across Cho’s face. “Cormac? What? No, of course not, I didn’t—”

“So hot,” Padma continues wistfully. “_So_ dumb.”

“It was the best man, obviously,” Penelope says, rolling her eyes at Padma. “What’s his—Marcus. Flint.”

Cho’s cheeks burn even hotter. “What do you—_obviously? _What’s obvious about it?”

“Marcus—oh, the _big_ guy? With all the tattoos? Cho, are you—” Padma coughs daintily into her fist. “Is this a quarter-life crisis thing? A cry for help?”

Cho swallows the rest of her wine and then carelessly deposits the glass on the floor by her feet. “Oh, my god.”

“Like, I get it,” Padma says after a brief pause, arching an intimidatingly perfect brow. “He’s got to be big _everywhere_, right, and he was definitely staring at you yesterday like he already has the ring picked—”

“Oh, my _god_,” Cho echoes, more faintly, refusing to answer. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” Marietta suddenly chirps as she glides out of the bathroom. “Are we making fun of Cho?”

“Cho’s banging the Hulk,” Padma drawls, smiling wickedly. “You should check out her neck, she looks like she stopped, dropped, and rolled through, like, a _forest_ of poison ivy.”

Penelope winces. “That isn’t how poison ivy—”

“And we’re laughing at that _because_ . . .?” Marietta asks, ruffling her dripping wet hair with a towel.

“Because it’s _hilarious_,” Padma says bluntly.

“And out of character,” Penelope adds.

“And _hilarious_.”

“He just doesn’t seem like Cho’s _type_—”

“It’s like _Beauty and the Beast _if _Beauty and the Beast_ was, like, a satirical metaphor for a _very specific_ PornHub algorithm?”

At that, Cho finally bursts out laughing—frantic, hysterical, mortified, high-pitched, _helpless_.

* * *

It _is_ all about timing, though, she thinks.

The wedding.

Marietta and Graham.

_Marietta-and-Graham._

* * *

Marcus-and-Cho.

* * *

The resort-assigned wedding coordinator who impatiently directs Cho, Padma, and Penelope to the sandy end of the aisle, behind the rows and rows and rows of artfully distressed white chairs, slatted wood backs draped in teal organza—she’s wearing a headset and holding a walkie-talkie, and Cho is distracted by it.

By the crackling noise of the speaker and the faint, thumping echo of the microphone and the unheralded reminder of her real life, her real job, and how far away both of those things have felt to her since Graham had slid over a scraggly sheet of guacamole-stained yellow paper in an empty midtown Starbucks and—

And.

The groomsmen appear on the opposite side of the aisle, their matching lavender bowties all undone and their gray linen jacket sleeves carelessly rolled up. Cho watches Marcus come closer, watches Marcus search for her, watches Marcus find her, and none of it actually happens in slow motion and the string quartet is still warming up so there isn’t a sweeping, majestic, grandly romantic soundtrack, either, but the way he holds her gaze, the way he doesn’t immediately glance down or around or behind her—it’s intensely, gratifyingly _poignant_.

A challenge, a greeting, a promise, a stubborn streak of heat, and far fewer questions than Cho expects there to be.

The minutes leading up to the actual ceremony are blurry; Cho tucks her hand into the bend of Marcus’s elbow and walks with him down the aisle, towards the whitewashed latticed dais covered in flowers and silk organza, and then Penelope and Cassius and Padma and Adrian are lining up next to them and Graham is fiddling nervously with his collar and Marietta is gliding towards them, her feet bare and her dress clinging to her legs and her hair already windswept and—

And.

The music fades.

The officiant clears his throat.

Marietta plucks a sheet of pastel pink college-ruled notepaper from the middle of her cleavage. Her vows, painstakingly written weeks ago and littered with poetry excerpts and song lyrics and numerology references and a weird, sappy anecdote about waffles that Cho suspects might be a sex thing. Marietta hesitates before she unfolds it, though, her eyes already shimmering with unshed tears and heavy, glittery makeup and a perfect storm of nerves and doubt and genuine, wholehearted elation that Cho feels like an intruder, uncomfortably voyeuristic, for even noticing.

Marietta doesn’t start reading.

She bites her lip and glances between Graham and the rosewater-scented paper in her hands—once, twice, _repeatedly_—and then out at the ocean, and then down at Cho, and then over to where her mother is sniffling and Graham’s father is surreptitiously checking his phone and—

And.

Marietta smiles, crumpling her vows up. “I mean,” she says to Graham, her voice ringing out loud and clear with an accompanying laugh, breathless and trembling. “You know, right?”

Graham grins, slow and then fast, stuttering out a delighted, shaky laugh of his own. “Yeah, baby,” he murmurs. “I know.”

They’re kissing before the officiant has time to declare them man and wife, before anyone has time to object, and Cho is almost positive that this isn’t what Marietta planned, isn’t what Marietta would have ever planned, that this isn’t the precise, exact moment the astrologist had told Marietta to wait for—but Cho is crying outright and Penelope is dabbing at her eyes with the tip of her pinky and even Padma is looking a little like she might be begrudgingly experiencing an actual emotion and—

And.

_And._

Marcus is stepping around the other groomsmen, edging behind them, ruining the wedding formation. He moves to stand next to Cho, gently nudging her with his elbow and passing her his pocket square so she can wipe her cheeks, save her makeup, and she instinctively reaches down to squeeze his hand.

He threads their fingers together.

* * *

And she decides, right then and right there—six years ago and six years after that and six years from now, too—that she isn’t going to let go.

* * *

She doesn’t _want_ to let go.

* * *

_SIX MONTHS LATER_

* * *

The digital alarm clock perched on the very edge of the bedside table reads 10:31 AM.

Cho yawns into her pillow—into Marcus’s pillow, technically—and rolls over, flinging her arms over her head and stretching her legs out, toes pointed down like she’s still five years old and struggling to learn ballet with Marietta.

“Hey,” Cho calls out, voice cracking, thick and groggy with sleep. She sits up and scoots backwards until she’s leaning against the sturdy cast-iron bars of the headboard. “What time are we supposed to be there?”

Footsteps sound from the hallway, audibly heavy, and then the door is swinging open and Marcus is sidling back over to the bed. He’s shirtless, still, basketball shorts sagging low on his hips, and he’s holding two steaming mugs of what smells like coffee.

“We’ve got a while,” he says, his own voice scratchy and muffled and so, so deep. “Would rather be late than early, anyway.”

Cho accepts the mug he offers her and takes a long, appreciative sip. “She’s totally pregnant.”

“Yeah.”

“I get why they want to, you know, _announce it_—”

Marcus grimaces. “I don’t.”

“—but they’re both so bad at keeping secrets that it’s, like, what’s the _point?_ We all already know.”

“Yeah.”

“Marietta didn’t even pretend to order a margarita the other night.”

“Maybe it’s a gender reveal,” Marcus says. “They have a tendency to move pretty quick. Skip some steps.”

Cho snorts, _giggles_, inadvertently spitting out a mouthful of coffee, and when she looks up again Marcus is staring at her, an odd expression on his normally expressionless face. There’s an almost tangible intensity to it—a kind of awe that’s missing that disbelieving, off-balance undercurrent of surprise. He doesn’t look surprised. He’s rubbing at the swan tattoo on his wrist, the one he’s added a lot to recently; a gradient splash of color, some wind-ruffled feathers, a microphone cord looped in the shape of a heart around its ankle.

“What?” she asks, trying not to smile.

He shrugs, mouth quirked, but he doesn’t bother hiding his smile—private, quiet, tender. Content. “Nothing.”

She raises her eyebrows and tucks a strand of loose, sleep-tangled hair behind her ear. “Not nothing.”

“No,” Marcus agrees, gaze sharpening, smile twitching wider. “Not nothing.”

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
